No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Mr. Beerbohm in his way is perfect ... He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes ... He is without doubt the prince of his profession.

I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.

Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.

The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

literature is the record of our discontent.